'Hope Against Hope' explores education in New Orleans

New Orleans did not volunteer to become a laboratory for experiments in revitalizing public school education. But the widespread destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 led to a series of actions that have almost completely altered the city's schools.

The Louisiana Legislature placed many New Orleans schools, already underperforming and troubled, in the state-run Recovery School District. Most are now charter schools.

"The principles of the New Orleans school overhaul do not differ significantly from those guiding school reformers across the country," writes Sarah Carr in her new book, "Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America's Children." But in New Orleans, Carr points out, "the changes happened virtually overnight."

Mercifully, Carr's book is not a polemic, a screed or a self-satisfied policy analysis, like so many other recent books about education in the United States. Instead, Carr follows a high school freshman, a new teacher and a veteran principal through a year of school, letting readers see their struggles and successes, what works and what doesn't.

Carr, a former Journal Sentinel reporter, moved to New Orleans in late 2007 to cover the reconstruction of the education system there. She now writes primarily for The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news organization specializing in education journalism, based out of Teachers College of Columbia University in New York.

In a telephone interview, Carr said she wrote the book because she wanted to go more in-depth about the educational issues she was reporting on.

Initially, she thought she would use the story of one particular school building to look at the history of urban education reform in New Orleans, but later realized that looking at three schools with varying philosophies would allow her "to explore the broadest array of themes."

A challenging high school

As the father of two high school students, I was particularly fascinated by Carr's narrative thread about Geraldlynn Stewart, a high school freshman at KIPP Renaissance High School, a new charter school. Raquel Dillon, Stewart's mother, was pleased with the school's serious intentions and the "warm, supportive atmosphere" it promised. Stewart, who'd earned good grades in a demanding middle school, was less enthused about "preppy uniforms, crazy rules, and nights and weekends full of schoolwork."

"It's a myth that most low-income families aren't involved" in their children's education, Carr said. Stewart's mother worked up to 80 hours a week in her two jobs busing tables and cleaning hotel rooms but still attended as many school-related meetings and events as she could. Stewart's stepfather, Langdon Dillon, exhorted her not to make the mistakes he did, and to get herself to college. With a 2.5 grade-point average in high school and a sufficient ACT score, she could qualify for a four-year scholarship to an in-state university.

In both skills and support at home, Stewart is better positioned than many of her classmates to succeed, but she has struggles and doubts, some of them occasioned by the school's own problems:

"Every few days it felt like there was a new problem: fights (including one in which a male student with special needs started choking a female classmate, and another that started in front of KIPP's New Orleans leadership team), a pernicious Facebook slam page, a knife found in a student's shoe. Worse, the misbehaviors of only a few caused a general negativity to spread throughout the school."

But Stewart also receives an infusion of wonder and hope on a school-organized visit to Dillard University, firing questions at her kind, brainy freshman tour guide.

Carr also tracks Aidan Kelly, a recent Harvard grad, recruited by the nonprofit alternative teacher-training program, Teach for America, who had never traveled south of Philadelphia before driving to New Orleans to teach at Sci Academy; and Mary Laurie, the principal of O. Perry Walker High School, who could draw on her own experience as a former teen mother.

As Carr points out, while Teach for America "routinely encounters resistance from unions and the education establishment," debate was "especially fraught" in New Orleans, where many veteran teachers had been fired after Katrina.

'Principals matter'

Many of the charter schools, including Kelly's, expect that teachers will work 60 to 80 hours a week, make home visits and be accessible until 9 p.m., which raises the genuine issue of how long teachers can sustain their lifestyle, Carr said.

I asked Carr what she might say to the Teach for America leadership if she were given the chance. Carr said she has the sense that, over the last decade, Teach for America has tilted a little too far toward recruiting people who teach for a couple of years as an experience, then go on to do something else. She'd encourage the leadership to "view it as a program where you (seek out) people who want to be lifelong educators."

While so much national education discussion is about teacher quality, Carr's experience covering schools in Milwaukee and New Orleans has taught her "how much principals matter," she said. Her ground-level advice to improving schools is to start by "getting the strongest people leading each individual school."

Laurie, her subject, is "one of those principals (who) instantly cast a spell over kids and wins their respect," Carr said.

In her book's epilogue, Carr notes that schools in New Orleans, as reflected by state standardized test scores, continue to improve, though "a comprehensive accounting of the changes will only be possible years from now, when the country learns not only how many New Orleans public school students graduate from college, but whether they can find sustainable jobs and safe neighborhoods in their hometown."

She also points out that policy-makers must be holistic: Improving the quality of education does not address the many ways that poverty affects children walking through the school door.